Varnish

 So, after getting all my guard varnished with Quickshade, I decided I needed to actually protect my vehicles as well, so when we were in my local GW stockist picking up a birthday present for my son's friend, I picked up a can of Munitorum Varnish. Now, I know that this isn't the best option for spray varnish but it's the easiest and most convenient for me. Living in a remote location has advantages but also disadvantages, one of which is an inability to just pop down the road to a big hobby shop and pick up whatever I fancy. So armed with my Munitorum Varnish I set to work on my vehicles. On the whole everything went nice and smoothly, with few problems, however, I did run in to the inevitable frosting issue! Now it wasn't actually that bad but still a little annoying.

It's a little hard to see on the knight but you can see the difference between the front of the gun and the rear, where the rear is a little frosted. The shoulder pad also got a little bit of frosting on it but the rest of the models seems fine, as shown below. 

However, the worst one so far appears to be the chimera, which has frosted around the top front end. It's a bit weird how it's frosted as it was sprayed in a continuous motion across the whole area, yet only those small areas have frosted. 

I know that the usual suspects for frosting are Humidity, temperature and an unshaken can, however, where I was spraying was right next to our little weather station (thermometer, barometer and hygrometer) so I know that things were within the recommendations on the can. All I can think is that these were "after thought" sprays, you know, those "I'll just spray a bit here for good measure" and they have reacted to the already drying sprays from before. Either way it's not going to ruin the models and I'll just leave it as it is.

What's more interesting however is the effect the spray had on some other aspects of the models.

On the Dreadnought, the spray seems to have affected the transfers on the legs. On most of the models, the spray varnish has caused the edges of the transfers to blend in and become very subtle, as seen on the skull right in the centre, however on the legs it's had the opposite effect. The transfers seem to have reacted with the spray, especially the red one, which has crinkled up slightly at the bottom. Now these are really old transfers, so maybe that's the problem, either way it's a bit annoying. I might try a second coat when I get a new can of spray, see if that solves it. 

The other strange effect I noticed was that the spray reacted with some paints, mainly non-GW paints. The Revell Aqua ones seem to be most affected and seemed to shrink and crack. It's not very noticeable once the varnish has dried but I did get a bit worried when I was spraying it.

Very edited photo

Above is an edited picture, a few taps of the auto fix, plus balance and other things adjusted, not sure what, I just played with settings until it showed the cracks clearer. As you can see though, the paint has gone a little funky. Like I said, it doesn't seem to affect the overall look and I doubt it will make any difference once on the tabletop but close up you can see it. What the paint has gone this way, I don't know but it's been on the model for quite a while so it will be dry and fully cured. It's not going to be a problem I think but it is a little annoying.

I'll grab another can and finish the rest of my models and see what happens with them.